It was the coldest it's been this winter last night. Down into the teens. That's very cold for the coastal plains. It's not going to get very warm today either, but at least it will be a little warmer than yesterday. It barely got above freezing. I got pen pals up in Chicago that might laugh when they read these silly remarks. They're acclimated to really cold weather, and we're not. I used to work with a group of men from Haiti when I lived in Florida. If the temperature got down to 70 degrees (21 C) they would come to work wearing sweaters. They just weren't used to it being so cold. The temperature at the Equator rarely, if ever, changes plus or minus two degrees all year long. People can die of over-exposure if it changes as much as five degree.
It's easy for me to forget my skin makes Vitamin D when it's exposed to enough sunshine. There's been a lotta information about vitamin D that's come to light in the last decade. Apparently the largest research project on vitamin D concluded recently, and the findings of that research is beginning to show up in the media. The articles I've been reading on the internet reveal lots of ideas about skin pigment and how that affects how much vitamin D a person's skin will produce. The lighter the skin color, the more sunlight it will accept and make vitamin D. As the amount of vitamin D reaches satisfactory levels the skin gets darker. Too much and the skin will burn and drive a person out of the sunlight.
I think a lot of people know an awful lot about how the sunlight affects them personally. They learn how much they can safely absorb and when to cover up. I suspect many of those same people may not realize the dynamics of the vitamin D process when they're out trying to get a tan. If they did, they would let that be their guide. Once the skin starts changing color on a particular outing that means the skin has stopped making vitamin D for a while. Each time the skin is exposed to the sunlight the color it starts at on that day is the criteria for when to cover up.
When I was a kid working all day in the sun it took weeks in the Spring to get tan enough to stay out in the sun wearing just a pair of shorts. For people who only got sun when they went to the beach on weekends it's was a different story. They tried to get a sun tan in a relatively short amount of time. They always seemed to push the envelop.
I wasn't the judge about how long to stay out in the sun in the Spring when I was a kid. It was mostly my mother and siblings who would tell me to go get a shirt on. I told them too if I noticed them getting red. It was as much compassion and empathy as much as it was a health thing. Getting sunburned hurts.
The other aspect of the new information on vitamin D is how it works to control the health of one's bones. People with vitamin D deficiencies have known problems like rickets. Soft bones. Vitamin D apparently regulates how calcium is used throughout the body. When I was diagnosed as having rheumatoid arthritis I was also diagnosed as having osteoporosis and prescribed calcium pills. Calcium that was not derived from dairy products, but coral and oyster shells. The calcium pills come with vitamin D included. That's one of the reasons I have bad teeth. If my body needs calcium and I ain't providing it from outside, then it's taken from my teeth and bones. As a person gets older they need to take calcium supplements so it won't be taken from what's already in there.
I don't know the truth. I write stuff here in my blog in some frail attempt to capture drifting thoughts with my scanty vocabulary. When I start writing stuff down to capture some odd thought that might drift through my psyche I don't have time to decide whether what I'm writing or copying is true or not. I can't afford to care if I wanna get something/anything down in writing. I trying to write some part of myself off before I get stuck with dealing with it during my death throes.
I have experienced the throes of death many times, and my experience in this arena is that I gone be mighty busy trying to stay oriented to the main chance if I wanna be-co-me some sort of god rather than be-co-me some sort of frog in the next life. Sadly, as the Great Pretender, it's completely up to me.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
